Meditation in Konya

Here in Konya, in the Rumi Hotel, just a block or so from Mevlana's shrine, my thoughts turn to the fundamental differences that distinguish pre-modern and modern assumptions about the nature and destiny of the human being (a preoccupation that afflicts everyone who spends time in the Turkish Republic).

Those differences are brought into stark relief by one of Mevlana's brilliant Khorasani precursors, Farid ud-Din Attar, in these lines from his famed Mantiq at-Tayr ("The Parliament of the Birds"):

Here every pilgrim takes a different way,
And different spirits different rules obey.
Each soul and body has its level here
And climbs or falls within its proper sphere--
There are so many roads, and each is fit
For that one pilgrim who must follow it.

[tr. Darbandi and Davis (1984), 179].

The "here" to which Attar refers is the "Valley of Insight into Mystery," a station along the way to the discovery of ultimate Reality, i.e., the Divine.

These lines bespeak the Islamic tradition's sanctification of the individual conscience: not the right but the responsibility of every individual to follow her or his own path to the (capital "T") Truth.

This distinction between rights and responsibilities is crucial to recognize, for pre-modern societies did not construct a notion of the human being upon a foundation of rights. The language of rights is post-Enlightenment and European. And from the standpoint of post-Enlightenment Europeans and their ideological progeny the world over (including here in the Turkish Republic), individuals are encouraged to assert their rights over against the rights of others. This modern modality often leads to adversarial institutions of legal process and the privileging of individualism at the expense of more communitarian considerations. Indeed, the argument is often made that, without a "rights-based" polity, individuality is inevitably submerged beneath the weight of tradition and group-think.

Such an argument ignores the degree to which group-think is ubiquitous in modern societies; it also ignores the fact, reflected in Attar's lines quoted above, that individuality receives ample expression in traditional cultures--even during historical periods that preceded the invention of rights-based political ideologies. In lieu of the language of rights, the traditional modality emphasizes the exercise of the individual conscience--indeed, it sanctifies the individual conscience--while, at the same time, regarding the individual as part of a larger community of individuals, all of whom are deemed to possess their own consciences to which they are ultimately responsible. However, proximately, any exercise of individual conscience that fails to take into consideration the prerogatives of the individual consciences of others is not an exercise of conscience worthy of the name.

The assertion of individual rights without regard to social responsibility is, perhaps, one of the most pernicious of modern social dysfunctions. When historians review the collapse of the modernist project, it is likely that they will find fault with the anti-communitarian myopia to which the post-Enlightenment economy of rights-based individuality led.

From the perspective of the Mazeppist, over the past 300 years, the language of rights has helped many individuals to negotiate--and even emerge victorious from--oppressive assertions of political power. But divorced from a sense of communal responsibility, rights-based systems themselves become sources of political oppression. If one wishes to be an historian, one must develop a keen sense of irony.